Before the split … Paula Patton and Robin Thicke in January this year. Photograph: Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage

There are falls from grace, and then there's Robin Thicke. His latest album, Paula, has entered the Official UK Chart with a bullet at ... No 200. To achieve this feat, Thicke has shifted a whopping 530 copies of Paula.

It has not been the best year for the singer, who split from Paula Patton, his wife of nine years, in February. His seventh album was named after her and billed as a declaration of love, aiming to win her back, but the campaign was hobbled by the disastrous #AskThicke Q&A on Twitter, in which the hashtag was bombarded with questions such as, "Is your next 'hit' just a lyric sheet, with a Rohypnol Sellotaped to it? #AskThicke" and "#AskThicke Did you really write a rape anthem as a love song for your wife and are you still wondering why she left you?"

The resulting sales of Paula seem to answer the question of whether there can be such a thing as bad publicity. Thicke's previous album Blurred Lines sold 25,981 copies in its first week, according to Music Week. Were Thicke's career to follow this trajectory, his next album would sell about 10 copies, with the following one failing to sell a single copy. Not even his best friend would buy one, nor Thicke himself.

Over in the US, Thicke's sales are not looking too healthy either. Paula sold about 25,000 copies there in its first week, according to Billboard – down from 177,000 sales of Blurred Lines in its first week.